Adwan/Basic Greetings and Common Phrases
NOT DONE. Before learning the actual language, it is vital to learn how things work in Adwan. Adwan, for starters, does NOT make a T-V distinction, that is, there is no "formal" way to address someone, unless you purposely use words like "your highness", "doctor", etc. Unlike many European languages, when addressing anyone, the second person singular is always used. Dialogue In Adwan, the most common way of greeting someone is to literally say "Greetings!". The noun for "greeting" in Adwan is Vora'', and when used, it is used in the plural nominative form (we'll go over cases later), which is ''Vorą. Below is a mini-dialogue between Þyjer and Fatryna which uses the most common basic greetings in Adwan. Observe. Þyjer: Vorą! Fatryna: Vorą! Þyjer: Þuðys þyd lyra śu? Fatryna: Þuðys Fatryneð lyra za. Þuðys þyd lyra śu? Þyjer: Þuðys Þyjered lyra za. Fatryna: Ï. Nuyransje končana sycor ju. Þyjer: 'Šycas konu, nuyransje končna sycor ju, ž! The above dialogue is relatively easy and simple. Here is a translation (not a gloss) of that they were saying. 'Þyjer: Hello! Fatryna: Hello! Þyjer: What's your name? Fatryna: My name is Fatryna. What is your name? Þyjer: My name is Þyjer. Fatryna: I see. It was nice to meet you. Þyjer: 'I agree, it was nice to meet you, too! Many things are moderately confusing, however; Names in Adwan follow different declensions than regular nouns do, and the phrase "Ï" is the equivalent to English's "I see...", not in the sense that one ''sees, but more of an affirmation. Word order in Adwan is much different from other European languages; here is a direct gloss of what they said. '''Þyjer: Greetings! Fatryna: Greetings! Þyjer: Is what name of you? Fatryna: Is Fatryna name of me. Is what name of you? Þyjer: Is Þyjer name of me. Fatryna: I see (affirmation). It was to meet nice you. 'Þyjer: '''I agree, it was to meet nice you, also! See the pattern? Adwan follows a liberal VOS word order, which is completely different from English's VSO order; however, it is very common for a sentence to not actually have a subject, if that subject is a personal pronoun, because of Adwan's verb conjugations and how they integrate the person into each verb. A good example of an English sentence put into VOS order is as so: SVO: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. VOS: Jumped over the lazy dog the quick brown fox. It may take some time to get used to, as VOS is quite rare in languages, but it is definitely doable. Now, how can one tell as to what the sentence is saying? Adwan makes extensive use of inflections: changes are made to verbs, nouns, adjectives, determiners, numbers and pronouns to show their function in a sentence. While VOS is usually the standard order, it is perfectly fine (although frowned upon as VOS is also formal, standard and polite) to use other word orders. Greetings Comparisons to English Here is a list of features of Adwan that an English speaker will find handy: *There are no articles. This means there is no ‘the’, ‘a’, or ‘an’. This means that other ways are used to tell the distinction between ‘cats eat’ and ‘the cats eat’; this can usually be made by the Generic or Habitual Mood of verbs. *Adwan's verbs integrate with pronouns; that is, "I am" in Adwan is, when translated literally, is "am"; each person is conjugated differently for verbs, however, so depending on the conjugation, that's what the subject is; therefore ''þuðas is "am-i", þuðys is "is-it", etc., etc. *Adwan follows a VOS word order, though it can follow various word orders to change emphasis. *There are no auxiliary verbs in Adwan; in that department, Adwan follows an extremely agglutinative format as for every function a verb has, a suffix is added. *Adwan has no reflexives; that is, no "myself", "yourself", "herself", etc. Instead, they make use of the Accusative case of pronouns, which functin the same way. *Adwan has no possessive adjectives "mine", "yours", etc., or any possessive pronouns "my", "your", etc. Instead, it declines pronouns to the Genitive case, that way "my cat" would be čata za, which, when translated, means "cat of me". *Adwan has more moods than English does, but has far less tenses; There are moods to express Habitual and Generic acts, Supine and Inchoative moods to indicate beginning of verbs and verbal nouns, and far more, but not as much ways to describe the past. *There are four tenses of the past: Simple, Imperfect, Continuous, and Perfect; plus the moods which add on more meaning. for example, the phrase "I started to ride my bike during the summer," in Adwan would be «''Yrkasjefylasil syklu za kurų vašnohö,» which, when translated directly, would be "I-ride-simple.past-start-generally bike of me every summer." *Adwan is not as irregular as English when it comes to verbs (even though there are a few good number of them), the irregularities usually occur with nouns and their classifications, and pronoun declensions. *Adwan, like English, typically doesn't make use of genders, unless specified (‘fevna’ is parent; ‘fevnaš’ is dad, or masculine-parent, and ‘fevnač’ is mother, or feminine-parent). *Unlike English, Adwan is a phonetic language. Its orthography is a lot more phonetic than English's, so how something is pronounced is how it's written. *Thereare three types of words in Adwan: general parts of speech, proper nouns, and compound-words. Unlike many languages that use etymologies and create words from roots, each word in Adwan has its own idea and special wording; it is also very rare to see two words express one thing (Ex: United States would be merged to be "Ĕceżena", which is the combination of ''ĕcor, the adjective for "united", and żena", ''which is a state or province.)(though of course, this is only for Proper Nouns); the only words that have etymologies are loan words and Proper Nouns. *Proper nouns are always all one word. A good example would be "Atlantic Ocean", with is ''Aznafykóšana; atlantic+ocean = aznafykor + óšana. Many of the times, when more than one words are needed to describe something, they're merged. The only time nouns are merged with adjectives are on proper nouns. Category:Adwan